For the next week and a half, each of the 10 short films nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Original Short Film will screen at the IFC Center. For that run, they are sure to remain hot commodities. But how many of them will continue to matter after the buzz surrounding the February 24 Oscars ceremony has faded?

For many fans of the Oscars, the year’s short films often stand as the ceremony’s biggest mysteries. That’s why, for the third consecutive year, Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International have teamed up to organize a rapid, semi-national release for these little-heralded achievements. Today, the program opens in some 50 cities across the country. At IFC Center, the nominees have been divided into two separate programs — one for animated shorts, the other for live action.

It’s always refreshing to see short films gain access to a wider audience. But visitors to the IFC Center will discover a crop of shorts that vary wildly in quality and craftsmanship. It’s a mixed blessing of sorts that will help to spread the word about a few true gems, but also will offer all the evidence needed that Academy voters don’t only botch the categories of Best Foreign Film (where is “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days”?) and Best Animated Film (how did “Surf’s Up” beat “The Simpsons Movie”?).

With that in mind, two of this year’s five Oscar-nominated live-action shorts operate on a completely different level than their counterparts. It’s like witnessing the difference between a minor league and major league baseball team. Residing in the majors are Denmark’s 39-minute “At Night,” a moving medical drama about three women struggling through the days in a hospital’s cancer ward, and Britain’s “The Tonto Woman,” an atmospheric Western about a man who risks his honor and his life to save a woman from her isolated imprisonment. While these two titles are the clear frontrunners for the Oscar, it’s the subject matter that likely puts Christian E. Christiansen’s “At Night” at the top of the list. Opening with a sparse, pensive look at a cancer ward in which each patient seems trapped within her own bubble, overcome by fear and trepidation, “At Night” is less a story of illness than one about unexpected friendships initiated by illness.

In the 35-minute “The Tonto Woman,” first-time director Daniel Barber makes a strong impression, bringing to life the solitude and testosterone of the Old West. At the heart of the film is the happiness of a woman who has been forever scarred by her experience as a prisoner at the hands of Mojave Indians. Sporting a facial tattoo given to her by her captors, the woman has been cast out by her community and all but abandoned by her husband, who’s nowhere to be seen until a rugged cattle rustler rides into town and starts to show interest in her. Outraged by the insult, the husband comes back into the picture with a vengeance.

The three remaining live-action shorts sputter more than they sparkle. France’s “The Mozart of Pickpockets” seems to be about a professional pickpocketing ring until it veers into a story of two crooks adopting a sad-faced orphan boy.

The Belgian entry “Tanghi Argentini” has been a popular awards favorite around the world. It’s a lighthearted tale about a timid office worker who asks one of his colleagues (a dance fanatic) to teach him the tango so he can impress a woman. The film is fun, but it’s the kind of flat, two-dimensional product that one would think the Academy is above.

The year’s oddball award goes to Italy’s “The Substitute,” a memorably bizarre story about a funny, frightening, and somewhat aggressive substitute teacher in an Italian high school who, it turns out, might not really be a teacher at all.

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Taken together, the animated shorts make up a far more impressive group.

The best of the bunch is Russia’s “My Love,” directed by Aleksandr Petrov, who took home an Oscar in 2000 for his short “The Old Man and the Sea.” Not only the most gorgeous of the animated nominees, “My Love” is also the title that most pushes the envelope in terms of style and technique. Utilizing an impressionistic approach that bathes the action in cool pastels and gives it the texture of broad brushstrokes, the visual surface of “My Love” is always crinkling and alive, moving and swirling.

While it’s the style that draws one in, it’s the majesty of the story that proves Mr. Petrov has adopted the right approach. “My Love,” about a lovelorn teenager in 19th-century Russia who’s prone to professing his undying affection to every woman in sight, is a fancy bit of magical realism, at once celebrating and exposing the boy’s passions as foolhardy exaggerations of the heart.

A close second in the animated program is Canada’s “Madame Tutli-Putli,” Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s short that samples freely from an array of filmmakers — hinting at the ambiguity of David Lynch, the stylized rigidity of Guy Maddin, and the dark humor of the Coen brothers. What the film is “about” only tells half the story: A frail and timid woman is jolted from her sleep to the realization that the train she’s riding has come to a stop. Bright lights flicker outsider her window and suddenly she sees a pair of gangly, grimy monsters walking the halls.

But it’s the tone of “Madame Tutli-Putli” that makes the story work. This isn’t a straight narrative; it’s a throbbing, pulsating, step-by-step nightmare played out in real time (a nifty advantage for short films). And the combination of the story’s imagination with the weight of the stop-action animation succeeds in helping the movie work its way under your skin.

The ambitious, surely arduous stop-motion entry “Peter & The Wolf” (Poland) looks and sounds great, but falls short on the editing side, ultimately feeling tedious and overlong. Canada’s “I Met the Walrus,” which blends an audio recording of a John Lennon interview from 1969 with an impressive array of computer-generated animated effects acting out Lennon’s words, ends up feeling shallow and superficial. And while cute and cuddly, France’s entry, “Even Pigeons Go to Heaven,” doesn’t quite connect the comedic dots, striving but failing to make a joke involving an elderly man, a priest, and an angry depiction of Death, who arrives with sickle in hand.

ssnyder@nysun.com